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The Buryats in China (Shenehen Buryats): the Role of School Education System in the Preservation of Identity

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The Buryats in China (Shenehen Buryats): the Role of School Education System in the Preservation of Identity Vol. 5, no. 1/2013 STYLES OF COMMUNICATION The Buryats in China (Shenehen Buryats): the Role of School Education System in the Preservation of Identity Irina Boldonova, Professor Buryat State University, Russia [email protected] Darima Boronoeva, Associate Professor Buryat State University, Russia [email protected] Abstract: This chapter is concerned with a Buryat origin minority in China named Shenehen Buryats. The Buryats originally reside in the Russian Federation around Lake Baikal. After facing serious administrative problems, several tribes preferred to flee from Russia. Administrative and land reforms shattered the traditional self-administration system and deprived the Buryats of about 30 % of usable land. The Buryat migrants settled in Inner Mongolia preserving their traditional nomadic economy. Nowadays the Shenehen Buryats are noted for their original culture and occupy their own ethnic and cultural niche in Inner Mongolia, a province of China. Schooling is one of the main factors helping them preserve native language and traditions. Undoubtedly, the specific linguistic situation among the Shenehen Buryats is a reflection of their history, relationships with their neighbors and a degree of internal unity. Nowadays Chinese is widely used in official discourse, economy, and inter-ethnic relations. At the same time Buryat continues to be a means of everyday communication. The Buryat language became a key element of ethnic identity when in the 1990s some Shenehen Buryats returned to their homeland. Two social worlds were formed as a result of separate existence and different ways of historic development. Under such conditions the language became a verbal marker of a common ethnicity. Keywords: migration, ethnicity, schooling, native language. The Buryats in China form a small minority. It is a little over six thousand people. According to the Chinese census data, they are officially identified as a separate ethnic group and classified as the Mongols. However, they represent a steady community, united by a common history, ideas of the same origin, local self-consciousness and system of immanent interrelations. Their self-definition, the Shenehen Buryats, highlights a deliberate separation of an ethnic group from the others. By calling themselves, the Shenehen Buryats, these people specify their original culture and demarcate its ethnic and cultural space. 7 Vol. 5, no. 1/2013 STYLES OF COMMUNICATION Historical and cultural experience of living in emigration, preservation of the language, customs and traditions attracts not just scientific, but also practical public interest. Some scholars rightly state that this Buryat ethnic group in China can be considered a unique laboratory to study the problems of conservation and transformation of identity, migration, diasporas, and the so-called “national revival projects” (Baldano & Dyatlov 2008: 165). The specific tendency of ethnic and cultural development of the Buryats in China is their orientation on reiteration of norms, values, and meanings. Traditionalism is mainly a result of geographical locality, relative isolation, living in compact groups, and late involvement into modernization processes. Taking into consideration recent discussions concerning the Buryat language and the ethnic identity issues it is important to emphasize that the Buryat language continues to be a means of information transfer, carrying out communicative functions within the community. It persists in this role despite the acculturation processes in the recent years. It is the language that still continues to be an integrating ethnic factor for the Shenehen Buryats. In other words, it is an identification symbol modeling their world. The language situation of the Buryats in China is closely connected with the peculiarities of historical development in general and the school system in particular. Thus we consider that it is important to study the history of schooling as a social institution that shapes a personality and the rules of the adaptation practices. 1. Reasons of migration and process of diaspora formation Each ethnic group has its own specific protecting methods of reaction to situations of environmental change connected with political and cultural reality. In emergency situations (discriminatory reforms, social cataclysms) an ethnic group with a well- established self-defense mechanism, consciously or unconsciously develops certain survival and ethnic identity preservation practices. Perhaps one of these “responses” was the Buryat migration in the late 19th – early 20th centuries southward from the Russian Empire. Formation of the Buryat ethnic community in Mongolia and China was a result of this trans-boundary migration. According to the official data of the most recent Mongolian 2010 census the Buryats in Mongolia numbered 48.450 persons, making up 1.7 % of the total population of Mongolia (2.805.825 people). As in the 2000 Mongolian census data, the Buryats still remain the fifth largest ethnic group (yastan) after the Khalkhas, Kazakhs, Derbets and Bayats. In Mongolia the Buryats are settled mostly in Dornod aimag (region) in Bayan Uul, Bayandun, Dashbalbar, Tsagaan Oboo somons (counties), Khentei aimag (Batshireet, Binder, Dadal, Norovlin and Byaan-Adarga somons) Selenga aimag (Erөө, 8 Vol. 5, no. 1/2013 STYLES OF COMMUNICATION Huder, Shaamar somons and district of Altanbulag), Central aimag (Mөngөnmor and Erdene somons), Khubsugul aimag (somons of Tsagaan-γγr and Hanh), Bulgan aimag (Teshig somon). More than 10.000 Buryats live in the capital Ulaanbaatar. According to printed media and scholarly studies the Buryat population in Mongolia ranges from 30.000 to 100.000 people. This considerable range is the evidence of policy issues affecting the census, the ambiguity of census data interpretation and complexity of determination of Mongolian Buryats’ identity (Varnavskii, Dyrkheeva & Skrynnikova, 2003). 2. The historical background of Buryat migrations to Inner Mongolia and Manchuria After the revolution of October 1917 seasonal migrations of the Buryats to Mongolia and Manchuria acquired mostly economic and ethno-preserving character. The urge to preserve ethnic identity was the result of Russian reforms in the late 19th – early 20th centuries aiming at the involvement non-Russian national territorial entities into the modernization process. One of the specific features of nomadic Buryats’ migratory behavior was absence of tight territorial limitations before they were imposed by the final incorporation of Transbaikalia into Russia confirmed by the Nerchinsk Agreement in 1689 and the demarcation of the Russo-Chinese border in the Bura Treatise of 1727. The Buryat nomads freely roamed from Lake Baikal to the Khalkha lands and back season by season. In various circumstances they were under the Russian administration or the Mongol rulers’ control. In the first half of the 18th century border control was not strictly enforced despite the demarcated boundary between Russia and China. This situation persisted in the future. Migrations of families and even larger groups in both directions continued. Because of border transparency among Mongol local territories, then between Qing China and Russia, many Buryats freely moved in neighboring Mongolia, Barga and the territories of border Cossacks. Most of them belonged to different tribes of the Aga Steppe Duma. There was a certain dependence of Buryat traditional economy and lifestyle on land resources of the neighboring states. In its turn, this resulted in porous frontiers and increased “contact” functions of borderlands. Describing the economic life of Aga Buryats in the pre-revolutionary period L. Linkhovoin noted that the Buryats living in Adun-Chulun (Tuurge, Zharan Sunhereg, Borzya, Taree Lake, Ulirenge), did not make hay for the winter season. During blight they wandered with their cattle searching for forage often moving into the Mongolian 9 Vol. 5, no. 1/2013 STYLES OF COMMUNICATION territory and Manchuria. After wintering there, they usually returned to their homeland in spring. As one can see, the migrations of Buryats to Mongolia and Manchuria had seasonal character and were not cases of final and determined settlement. This type of migration is concerned with limited pasture resources in winter. This means that nature was the determining factor for this type of migration. Administrative and land reforms destroyed the traditional governing system and deprived the Siberian natives of about 30 % of their land in use (Dameshek 1986). This inevitably led to a civilizational conflict between the Buryats and the Russian state (Varnavskii et al. 2003). The increasing number of Russian migrants from the European part of the empire came to Siberia, including the territories of the Buryat settlement, for the purpose of land settlement. They “changed the relationship of the indigenous population with the Russians and promoted the development of identification process” (Varnavskii et al. 2003: 37). This process revitalized legends, rhymes, and prophecies about migration of the Buryats to Mongolia. This attempt of the tsarist government to carry out administrative and land reforms with disregard to the existing cultural differences between the Russians and the Buryats was interpreted as forced Russification and infringement of national rights (Zhamtsarano 1907: 5). At the beginning of the 20th century the Buryat national intellectual elite declared an idea of the protection of ethnic interests. This was triggered by the reduction of Buryat
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